8.
He was initially assigned to a bomber squadron at Hamilton Field. The Schrievers’ first child, Brett Arnold—Brett for his grandfather, Arnold for Hap—was born on March 23, 1939. In the meantime, George Brett returned to the States to take over the Matériel Division, predecessor of the Air Matériel Command, the Air Corps’ research and development center, with its testing facilities and laboratories at Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio. Bennie had often told his father-in-law of his ambition to attend the Engineering School there, the Air Corps’ senior technical school, which gave those officers selected a year’s course in general aeronautical engineering. The school had been temporarily closed, but was due to reopen soon. Brett needed test pilots who could handle the variety of aircraft being evaluated at Wright Field as American industry revved up production. His wife, Mary, also could not enjoy a grandson who was more than half a continent away. Brett contacted Arnold, since promoted to major general and chief of the Air Corps, and asked to have Bennie assigned to him as a test pilot. Arnold assented. To make certain that transfer orders would be issued expeditiously, Brett followed up on August 28, 1939, with a “Dear Duncan” letter to Lieutenant Colonel Asa N. Duncan, one of Arnold’s assistants at his office in Washington. He opened by telling Duncan he had just received a note from Arnold saying that Arnold would approve Lieutenant Schriever’s transfer from Hamilton to Wright Field:
As you know, the boy is my son-in-law and Mrs. Brett is very anxious to have them come to Dayton at this time. In addition thereto, Lieutenant Schriever has all the qualifications of one of the officers I am very anxious to get into the Flight Test Section. He is a technical engineer, has had a year with the airlines on one of the toughest runs in the United States, has had about two and a half years’ active duty as a Reserve officer, and has now been on duty at Hamilton Field for approximately one year.
If possible I would like very much to have him sail from San Francisco sometime the first part of October as they have a small baby and we would like to have the baby here before the cold weather sets in.
(Air Corps families moved then by ship and rail, not in aircraft.)
Except for the fact Lieutenant Schriever fits in very well with the qualifications for the Lieutenants I have asked for duty with the Flight Test Section, all the other reasons are on account of a doting grandmother.
The copy of the letter that went into Schriever’s personnel file was marked “OK” and initialed by Arnold. The appointment was justifiable enough, but there was one fib, perhaps unintentional. His bachelor’s degree in construction engineering from Texas A&M hardly qualified him as “a technical engineer” in any way that related to aircraft. The overt nepotism and easy familiarity of the letter were reflections of the clublike atmosphere in the between-the-wars Army Air Corps, an atmosphere that was soon to dissolve under the hurly-burly of the conflict to come. Schriever was fortunate to have arrived before it did.
He entered the Air Corps Engineering School at Wright Field in July 1940, after nearly nine months there as a test pilot in Brett’s Flight Test Section. Schriever had developed an interest in aeronautical engineering to an extent that he was not afraid of being sidelined into technical jobs and deprived of command positions if he pursued it. Air Corps officers of the pre-Second World War period were probably the best-educated group within the entire Army officer corps. Until mid-1941, the two years of college or passage of an equivalent examination remained a minimum requirement for the flying cadet program, and many officers had a full bachelor’s degree or were working toward one. A few had gone on to doctorates, the best known of them dauntless James “Jimmy” Doolittle, the accomplished racing pilot who had earned a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was just being recalled to active duty from an executive position at Shell Oil. A sizable number of others had either obtained master’s degrees or attended the Engineering School. One reason higher education did not necessarily shunt an officer off into a technical slot was that almost all were then pilots, “rated officers” as the term went, and so considered potentially qualified to command in the air.
The current commandant of the Engineering School, George Kenney, was an example. Kenney was another figure who later exerted a major influence on Schriever as commanding general of Douglas MacArthur’s air forces in the Southwest Pacific. Originally educated as a civil engineeer at MIT, Kenney had become an aviator during the First World War, returned from France after seventy-five missions with a Distinguished Service Cross and a Silver Star for Gallantry, and devoted much of his time in the period between the wars to the study of aeronautical engineeering and its application to combat aviation. He was an earlier graduate of the school himself. That May of 1940, after President Roosevelt had called for a production goal of fifty thousand aircraft a year in a speech to Congress, Arnold had ordered Kenney and a team of officers under him to lay out a plan for the creation of the U.S. Army Air Forces. In those pre-computer years, they had it done with a big roll of butcher-shop paper. As they unrolled the paper they wrote out a two-year program of production schedules, and training schedules, and organization schedules, and airfield construction schedules all meshing with one another—so many trainer aircraft by x date, to train so many pilots by y date, to form so many fighter and bomber groups by z date.
Schriever impressed Kenney, who noted on his efficiency report a year later in July 1941 that he was graduating from the Engineering School with an academic rating of “Superior.” He had done so well, in fact, that he was one of those selected to go on to Stanford University in September 1941 for a master’s degree in more advanced aeronautical engineering studies. Bennie moved his young family out to Menlo Park, California, right near the university. That June, Dora had given birth to their second child, a daughter, Dodie (after the nickname of Dora’s maternal grandmother) Elizabeth (for Bennie’s mother).
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December, he assumed he would receive immediate orders to drop his courses and go. He heard nothing and after a while grew worried that he had been forgotten in the rush to fight. He called Arnold’s office in Washington and spoke to one of the general’s assistants. He was told to be patient and that he would be receiving orders. Finally, in March, the orders came. He was to report for further assignment to the headquarters of the U.S. Army Air Services, Southwest Pacific Area, then in Australia, the aviation maintenance and engineering command for the region. To his surprise, the orders stated that he was not to leave until he had completed his course of study and obtained his master’s degree, which would keep him at Stanford until June 14, 1942. Schriever thought the orders rather strange. He was an experienced pilot and men like him were needed in cockpits right now. Someone up above had apparently decided, however, that there would be war enough for everybody and that his special knowledge would be put to good use.